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SOUTHERN SLAVERY 



AND ITS RELATIONS TO 



NORTHERN INDUSTRY 



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SOUTHERN SLAVERY 



AND ITS KELATIONS TO 



NORTHERN INDUSTRY: 



A LECTUKE DELIVEKED AT THE 

CATHOLIC INSTITUTE, IN CINCINNATI, 

January 34, 1862. 
BY HENRY REED. 



CINCINNATI. 

ENQUIRER STEAM PRESSES. 

1862. 



SOUTHERN SLAVERY AND ITS RELATIONS TO NORTHERN INDUSTRY. 



It is common to hear it said that Slavery has existed, at one 
time or another, in all parts of the world. The remark is true 
enough; but it would be just as true and more philosophical to 
say that servitude, in some form or other — its character deter- 
mined by the character of the parties — is a thing of all ages' 
and of all countries. It has not only always existed, but there 
is every reason to believe that it will continue to exist until the 
time arrives — which need not be soon expected — when every 
human being in the world will be equal to every other, in 
vigor, activity, ambition and intelligence. 

Everywhere, and especially in those countries which we arc 
wont to call civilized, the relation of master and servant is to 
be found, with a greater or less distance in the social scale be- 
tween the one order and the other. The servile class, what- 
ever it may happen to be called — whether slaves, servants, 
help, workmen or operatives — always performs the labor of the 
community, by which it gains subsistence; while the master 
class receives the profit, gaining thereby comfort or luxury: 
and in this most material respect, all forms of servitude agree. 
If the laborer is able to live by his labor in a manner conform- 
ably to his ideas — however rude his manners and uncultivated 
his tastes — society is satisfied; and seldom, in its own case, 
takes the trouble to inquire whether he is rising or sinking in 
manhood or intelligence in consequence of his servitude. 

In fact, society seldom becomes conscientious in respect to 
its own conditions. It assumes them to be right, or at least 
the best the circumstances will permit. Believing that it un- 
derstands its own case better than others can understand it, so- 
ciety does not listen with patience to the suggestions or remon- 
strances of outside reformers, and always treats them as un- 



sound and impertinent, A community is much more prone to 
become conscientious in respect to the conditions of another 
community than to those of its own. Philanthropy is a far- 
seeing virtue; and prefers rather to point its telescope to 
objects of commiseration at a distance, than to busy itself in 
seeking out, with unaided vision, and correcting the abuses of 
its own household. 

The word Slavery, in a collective sense, is used to designate 
the relation which exists between the master and the servile 
classes in certain parts of the world. In those parts of the 
American Continent where slavery does not exist, men are so 
much accustomed to look at it in its collective aspect, that they 
mistake several of its most essential characteristics. Slavery, 
as much as any other form of servitude, is simply a relation 
between the individual master and the individual servant. 
Society as a body of individuals, combine together for the mu- 
tual protection of their interests in their slaves; but the inter- 
est pre-existed the combination; and the character of the serv- 
itude is no more changed by it, than that of the corresponding- 
relation in other parts of the Continent is affected by the legal 
rules under which the obligations of contracts are enforced. 

Slavery — so far as the principles upon which it exists are 
concerned— is as little understood in the Southern States as it 
is in the Northern. Indeed all the theories which are accepted 
in the North upon the subject, have been borrowed from the 
South; and they are all erroneous. Slavery is not — as it is 
continually called— an institution. An institution is a thing 
which is created by law, or by some convention or agreement 
having the force of law over those by whom it is established. 
It therefore has a beginning in time, before which it did not 
exist; and may be uncreated by a reversal of the process by 
which it was created. Slavery in respect to law, had no begin- 
ning in time. It began when the first slave was landed upon 
the shores of America. Logically, if not actually, it preceded 
all laws, conventions or agreements. There are laws by which 
slavery is regulated, and the rights of the master protected; 



but there is not now, and never has been, a law by which 
it was declared that the negro should be the property of the 
white man, any more than there is a law by which it is de- 
clared that horses or houses shall belong to their several pro- 
prietors. The relation arose out of the actuality in the one 
case, precisely as in the other. All the laws, therefore, which 
have been passed in respect to slavery have not changed its 
character a particle ; nor would that character be changed by 
their repeal. In this respect, it stands upon the same footing 
with the relations of husband and wife, of parent and child, 
and of employer and employed in the Northern States. 
Neither of them owe their existence to law; and neither of 
them would be abolished by a repeal of all the statutes by 
which their existence is recognized. 

Slavery is not, therefore — as lawyers and politicians and 
statesmen have called it, from time immemorial — a creature of 
local law: nor is it a creature of any other written law or 
agreement. It is a fact. Like all the other organic relations 
of society, it stands upon its actuality. Statutes did not make 
it and can not unmake it. It can neither be destroyed by re- 
peal nor by enactment. Institutions and constitutions may pass 
away, and yet it will not necessarily be affected by the revolu- 
tion. The only way to get rid o.f it is by force — through the re- 
volt of the slave breaking his bondage, or the intervention of 
an overpowering force from without. 

The right of slaver} r — if such a thing exists — is to be found 
where the rights of all the other domestic relations are posited. 
All the hypotheses that have been started by Southern politi- 
cians and philosophers with a view to establish an abstract 
right in one body of men to hold another in a servile condi- 
tion are entirely untenable. The notion that the negro, being- 
descended from Caixan, the son of Ham, became not only black 
but subject to slavery in consequence of the curse pronounced 
by Noah upon his father, on an extraordinary accession of 
moral virtue, such as often occurs after a lit of drunkenness, 
and that therefore he may be reduced to servitude wherever 



6 

found, is simply puerile, and has no shadow of testimony for 
its support. We have no knowledge of the origin of the Afri- 
can: and the story of the curse of Cainan was told, as all 
must be aware who are conversant with the Bible, for another 
purpose than to sanction negro slavery: to supply a reason — 
perhaps after the fact — for the destruction of the Canaanitish 
tribes by the Hebrews under Joshua. 

Nor does the fact — if it is a fact— that the negro is of an in- 
ferior order of the creation, afford theoretical ground upon 
which to establish a right to hold him in any form of subjec- 
tion. The question whether one given race is inferior to 
another is always open to dispute, in which both the parties 
are entitled to a hearing, while there is no umpire with author- 
ity to decide the controversy. The assumption of this ground 
by Southern writers has opened the door to a great variety of 
questions: as to the capacity of the negro, his susceptibility of 
cultivation, and his ability for self-government — questions that 
have been themes for a vast amount of wrangling and dispute; 
but which as yet exhibit no appearance of approaching a satis- 
factory settlement. These writers, in their anxiety to prove 
their theory, overlooked the important fact that, admitting 
that one race of men is superior to another, it does not neces- 
sarily follow that the former is thereby endowed with a natu- 
ral right to hold the latter in servitude. 

Society is not founded upon theories but upon facts. It 
takes little or no cognizance of the relative value of races ; but 
all its conditions are established uj)on the relative value of in- 
dividuals. Slavery in the Southern States owes its existence, 
not to the fact that the African race is inferior to the Anglo- 
American, but to the fact that the individuals of the African 
race who there reside, are inferior to the individuals of the 
Anglo-American race. Society takes no account of ultimate 
capabilities, but acts solely upon present ones. Its relations 
are not fixed by what this or that man or order of men may 
become; but by what they are. Social as well as material 
things have their laws of affinity and gravitation, under the 



operation of which the elements of which they are composed 
find their proper places, in accordance with their present val- 
ues. In a community composed of individuals differing from 
each other in intelligence, activity and ambition — whether 
they be of different races or of the same — the superior, by the 
unconscious natural force of their own qualities, will rise to the 
top; while the inferior, in consequence of their deficiencies, 
will remain at the bottom. 

The normal condition of human society is unity of race. 
Nature does not, of its own accord, introduce two distinct races 
of men upon the same soil. America is in the peculiar condi- 
tion — unprecedented before its discovery — of being inhabited 
by two orders of the human family, both exotic, widely differ- 
ent in constitution, character and appearance, drawn from 
parts of the world far distant from each other; and almost 
total strangers until they were introduced together upon a con- 
tinent that was foreign to both. Whether this introduction 
was right or wrong, fortunate or unfortunate, is not now the 
question. The thing is done, and can not be undone. Both 
have a right to remain ; for every human being has a title by 
birth to tread the earth and breathe the air of his native land. 
Of the two — if there is any difference — the title of the African 
is the best; for he came by compulsion; and may, in justice, 
demand that he shall be tolerated in a country to which he was 
brought through no agency of his own. 

Let us not fall into the most common of errors and charge 
as the evils of slavery those things which are the natural 
result of the intermixture of two widely different kinds of peo- 
ple, in nearly equal proportions upon the same soil. By far 
the greater share of those moral offenses that are alleged to be 
the offspring of slavery, owe their origin to that juxtaposition 
of races, which would continue were slavery abolished. And 
even for those which grow out of the servile relation, there 
may be compensating considerations. All over the world the 
condition of two different races, in the same country, each in- 
dependent of the other, is one of antagonism. Unless there is 



an existing and permanent interest to bind tliem together, they 
are always at enmity. Under that enmity, both are the suffer- 
ers ; but the weakest and least enterprising race is the one that 
will suffer most; and the tendency, as experience has abun- 
dantly shown, is to its ultimate extinction. 

The object of society is to promote the best good of its mem- 
bers, by preserving a general peace. The peace of society is 
best preserved when all of its members form a single indus- 
trial community. The bond of interest is the strongest, most 
persistent and most uniform in its operation of any with which 
mankind-are acquainted. The effect of the dissolution of the 
tie between the dominant and the servile population of the 
Southern States — if it were not followed by an immediate war 
of races, or a general emigration of the negroes to the North- 
ern — -would doubtless be a resolution of Southern society into 
distinct communities. After the abolition of slavery in New 
England, the negroes — those of them who did not keep up their 
old connection with the lamilies in which they had been do- 
mesticated, or become openly vagabond — retired to waste lands 
in out of the way places, where they built their little villages 
of huts, returned as nearly as the nature of the climate and cir- 
cumstances would permit, to the habits of their African ances- 
tors, regained their ancient African religions and superstitions, 
cultivated their little patches of corn and potatoes, but lived 
principally upon the proceeds of petty depredation. The corn 
and potato fields, the hen roosts and the sheep-folds of the 
neighborhood supplied the greater share of their means of sub- 
sistence ; and now and then one, with a share of Anglo-Saxon 
blood in his veins, became a bold burglar, and levied contribu- 
tions upon the country stores of the region for many miles 
around. 

The effect of this mode of life was a rapid extinguishment 
of the manumitted slaves and their descendants. Their natu- 
ral improvidence, their carelessness of the sick, their in- 
attention to the young, and the severity of the climate to- 
gether did the work, "and slowly and by degrees," says the 



New England historian, Eliot, "the negroes went out and dis- 
appeared." 

That which happened in New England— with such differences 
as the climate required or permitted— took place in Jamaica 
and Trinidad, and in other British West Indian and South 
American possessions, after the abolition of Slavery in those 
countries. The negroes ceased to become producers of a sur- 
plus for exportation ; they settled upon wastelands and formed 
distinct communities ; they confined their industrial efforts to 
the production of the means of subsistence, and, in short, be- 
came completely Africanized : and so they remain. 

In some of the West India Islands— it is proper to say in 
this connection— where there were no waste lands, and where 
the negroes were obliged to work on the plantations or starve, 
the change by emancipation was in favor of the master. The 
production of exportable articles continued. The planter pro- 
cured his labor at considerably less than it cost him under the 
old system, and was relieved from the expense of subsisting 
the aged and the infants, and of furnishing medical attendance 
to the sick. The result, however, is a diminution of about one 
per cent, per annum of the negro population, instead of an in- 
crease of about three per cent., as was the case under Slavery. 
There is another fact also that deserves to be stated: The 
increase in commodities for export which has been observed, 
within a few years past, in some of the British American Colo- 
nies, is not attributable, as some have alleged, to a return of 
the negro to habits of industry, but entirely to the introduction, 
under the auspices of the British Government, of a new class 
of laborers— the coolies from China and Hindostan. The serv- 
ices of these people, costing less than that of the negroes under 
Slavery, is more profitable; while being more frugal and am- 
bitious, many of them are able to save monev, and aiter a few 
years return to their native land in a state of comparative af- 
fluence. 

t , , There are several stereotype charges against Slaverv, which 
mankind repeat without a very accurate idea of their sismifica- 

2 ° 



10 

tion. Slavery is said to be a condition of involuntary servi- 
tude. We are prone to forget, while thinking of the wrongs 
of the African, that all servitude is involuntary. No man la- 
bors for the pleasure of laboring. He who creates, as the art- 
ist, the poet, or the historian, may find enjoyment in the work 
of creation ; but all who simply produce — the laborer, and es- 
pecially that unskilled laborer who constitutes so large a ma- 
jority of every operative population — works only because he is 
under some sort of necessity. The great mass of the laborers 
of the world, here and elsewhere, labor all their lives practi- 
cally for food and clothing and shelter — precisely that which 
the slave receives. There is one difference in favor of the slave: 
He has a home and support when he is old and incapable of 
further service — a thing in which the destitute free laborer is 
deficient. 

Slavery is said to be a great crime, because it makes one hu- 
man being the property of another. The more fully we under- 
stand the nature and universality of the proprietary relation, 
the less we shall be inclined to make the case of the slave an 
exceptional one in human society. Whatever a man has, which 
is of value to himself, and to which he has any especial right 
of possession, is his property. Thus a man has a property in 
his hired servant and in his indentured apprentice. The pa- 
rent has a property in his children and the children in the pa- 
rent. The husband— provided she is of any value, and in any 
sense exclusively under his dominion — in his wife; and the 
wife — with similar conditions — in her husband. The fact of 
the proprietorship does not determine the justice or injustice 
of the relation ; which depends entirely upon other circum- 
stances. 

Slavery is supposed by such as are without knowledge of its 
actualities, to be entirely arbitrary — consisting of despotic 
power upon one side, and unwilling obedience upon the other. 
The fact that different kinds of men, when thrown into condi- 
tions of actual intimacy, exert an influence upon the charac- 
ters each of the other, which serves, without any consciousness 



11 

upon their part, to bring them into a state of moral commu- 
nity, is overlooked. In the sense of simple power and obedi- 
ence, the word slavery does not describe the domestic and eco- 
nomical relations of the South. In fact, the mastery there is 
a divided mastery. This is especially true of the older com- 
munities, where the connection between the same servile and 
dominant families has continued through several generations. 
If the master is the dictator in one respect, the slave is the 
dictator in another. If, for example, the white man fixes the 
direction, the black man determines the rate of the movement. 
Everything south of the Ohio travels at the negro gait. After 
twenty generations of urging and driving, that gait is the 
same in which his ancestors traveled through the swamps and 
jungles of Africa. It has not, for two hundred years, accele- 
rated a particle. It is not the unwillingness of the slave, in- 
dignant at the servitude to which he is reduced — as philan- 
thropists profess to believe — but the native inertia of the ne- 
gro. It dops not come from generations of oppression, but 
from the small lungs, slow respiration, and consequent inac- 
tivity of the brain and nervous system— the seats of the mus- 
cular power — which belonir by nature to the African. And to 
this necessity the master, unable to amend the work of crea- 
tion, is obliged to conform. 

It is customary with persons whose sensibilities are more 
acute than their information is correct, to represent the negro 
of the Southern States as pining amid his servitude, and under 
the influence of an opinion that all men are created equal, and 
are alike entitled to the enjoyment of the right of free-agency, 
protesting continually in spirit against the bondage to which 
he is subjected. This is a mistake. The negro dislikes Slavery 
in his own person, because it interferes with his native lazi- 
ness. He sees no harm in holding others in a condition from 
which he would willingly escape himself. He admits Slavery 
to be right, while he runs away from the labor which it im- 
poses, and if opportunity offers, becomes a slave-holder with- 
out a thought of compunction, or of pity for those over whom 



12 

he exercises the rights of ownership. He is a hard master, 
more cruel and exacting than the white man, and less careful 
of the lives and comfort of those under his dominion This in- 
difference to liberty as a principle is pointed out by Hegel, the 
German philosopher — himself opposed, m sentiment, to Slav- 
ery—in his celebrated "Philosophy of History," as a marked 
characteristic of the negro race. 

Dr. Livingston — no friend of Slavery — in his well-known 
work, detailing the results of his observations and experiences 
during many years spent in Africa, states it as a lamentable 
fact that the prevailing sentiment upon that continent is hatred 
of the anti-slavery and friendship for the pro-slavery nations 
of Europe. The Englishman is every where distrusted, his 
progress hindered by all the artifices of negro cunning and 
treachery, and his person treated with contempt or indiffer- 
ence ; while the Spaniard and the Portuguese are received at 
once into friendship and are entertained with faithfulness and 
confidence. Had the wrongs which, in the common opinion, 
these nations have for so many generations inflicted upon Af- 
rica been considered wrongs by the people of Africa, this 
would not be the case. There is probably no part of the world 
where the popular feeling is so unanimous in favor of Slavery 
as in that country where, according to the common idea, the 
universal voice is raised in a despairing cry for relief, and every 
hand stretched forth in an imploring attitude to heaven for 
vengeance upon the oppressor. 

If the slaves of the South have any feelings of friendship 
for the Abolitionists of the North, these feelings are of recent 
origin. Formerly, it cannot be denied, the case was different. 
Whether the old sentiments, or those which are thought to ex- 
ist at present among them, were the result of misapprehension, 
is a point upon which there is room for difference of opinion. 
The ignorant are ever prone to supply the place of knowledge 
by the creations of the imagination ; and the hope of relief 
from labor, with, perhaps, a support in idleness through the 
munificence of their new friends, doubtless has had the effect 



13 

to render thousands of them uneasy under their present condi- 
tion, and lead them to regard with favor those through whose 
exertions they hope for a change so desirable. That, as they 
understand it, inducements have been presented to them which 
are not in fact to be realized, is unquestionable. But there are 
reasons which compel the belief that the reports of the uneasi- 
ness of the slaves in the Southern States are greatly exagge- 
rated. The full-blooded African is, in general, as content as 
the laborer of any other race, with his lot. It is those who 
have in their veins some of the more active blood of an Anglo- 
Saxon ancestor, and with it a spark of Anglo-Saxon ambition, 
who are inclined to be disorderly. 

Whether or not a race of people pine under any given con- 
dition, may be determined with some exactitude by an exami- 
nation into the effect which that condition has upon their laws 
of increase. Any great and unnatural oppression reduces the 
reproductive energy, and either operates as a check upon in- 
crease, or prevents it altogether. The negro seems fitted for a 
state of servitude, by the fact that in every known case his 
numbers augment more rapidly in Slavery than in freedom. 
In the Northern United States we owe the present compara- 
tively small aggregate of our colored population to the fact that 
the annual number of deaths is greater than that of the births. 
In Barbadoes and Antigua, statistics collected at the public ex- 
pense show a yearly reduction of one per cent, since emanci- 
pation, against an increase of two or three before that event. 
In the Southern States the average length of life is greater 
among the slave than among the free colored population ; and 
it is probable that if the truth could be ascertained, while the 
former enjoys a regular increase in numbers, the other would 
be found to suffer a regular diminution. 

As the stronger and more vigorous trees of the forest dwarf 
and eventually destroy the weaker and less thrifty vegetation, 
so the race of men to which we belong seems fated to root out 
and exterminate every other race of energy and vitality in- 
ferior to its own with which it comes in contact, unless there 



14 

is an existing bond of interest which leads the one, for its own 
sake, to extend its protection over the other. The native In- 
dian of America has nearly disappeared before a new and 
ranker human growth upon the same soil. There has not been 
in the relations between the two races in North America any 
reason why the Indian tribes should fade away and go out be- 
fore the advancing step of the white man, as they have done, and 
wo must look for the cause in some occult law of nature similar 
to that which produces corresponding effects in the vegetable 
kingdom. It is true we have a sort of national creed in re- 
spect to the disappearance of the Indian, and number his de- 
parture among our national sins — things which it is pleasant 
and magnanimous to confess; and easy also, because no one in 
particular is responsible for them — and talk in aboriginal hero- 
ics of the cursed tire-water by which he has been washed away 
and sent before his time to the happy hunting-ground reserved 
for people of his complexion. All this would be well enough, 
if it did not fail to account for the existence of that fatal ap- 
petite for strong liquor, under the influence of which the native 
tribes have — or, at least, are supposed to have — drunk them- 
selves to death: a feat which no other race of men of which 
we have any knowledge ever succeeded in accomplishing. The 
truth is, the Indian love of stimulants is one of the evidences 
of a pre-existing constitutional inferiority. If arduous drink- 
ing destroyed the native lords of the forest, it was because the 
native lords of the forest were in a state to be destroyed by 
arduous drinking; for no one acquainted with the subject will 
venture to deny that the same number of Germans, Irish or. 
Americans could, within an equal period, have consumed three 
times the amount of similar drinkables, without being percep- 
tibly affected by the achievement. Our own race for a thou- 
sand years, has been the hard-drinking race of the world; and 
yet it manifests no disposition to succumb under the effects of 
its multitudinous potations. 

Of all the European families, the Anglican seems to be the 
one whose vicinity is most fatal to the African, Asiatic and 



15 

aboriginal American; and whether the negroes of the Southern 
States would endure and continue to increase in numbers after 
the severance of the ligament of interest which now connects 
them with the whites, is a question which only time and a trial 
can determine. So far as the climate is concerned, the chances 
are in their favor; and it might be centuries before any mate- 
rial reduction would be discovered; but the end would proba- 
bly be the absorption of a part, and the extinction of the re- 
mainder. We are a cruel race of people. The barbarians of 
the world kill when they are enraged; we when it is for our 
interest. The people of California murder the Indians of that 
country — the most harmless of human beings — in cold blood, 
simply because they do not like their looks. Emancipated, the 
slaves of the South would be in the way; and this fact alone 
would be sufficient to surround them with dangers. Their 
safety is in their dependent condition; and in spite of all our 
cant about Christian charity, Christian philanthropy and Chris- 
tian civilization, the only guaranty of their, existence worth 
any thing, is in their value as the producers of a surplus for 
exportation for those who exercise over them the rights of 
ownership. 

The wrongs of slavery are wrongs committed by the individ- 
ual master upon the individual slave. They are no more nec- 
essary parts of the system of Southern labor than the frauds 
which Northern masters sometimes perpetrate upon their em- 
ployees are parts of the system of Northern labor. Power 
will, now and then, fall into bad hands, and when it does so, it 
is liable to be abused. The passionate Southern master beats 
his slave now and then unreasonably ; the passionate Northern 
one practices similar cruelties upon his children or perhaps his 
wife. In proportion to the whole number, there are probably 
as many men in the Northern cities who abuse their wives, as 
there are men upon the Southern plantations who abuse their 
negroes. It is a mistake to say that the possession of power 
necessarily makes men tyrannical; and yet it is upon this the- 
ory that much of the popular opinion in respect to the wrongs 



16 

of slavery is founded. In vulgar hands, new-found power is 
apt to become arbitrary; but if in all persons, or even in a 
majority, power were attended with this effect, the fact would 
furnish a conclusive reason against every species of authority; 
not merely that of the master over the servant, but of the hus- 
band over the wife, the parent over the child, the public func- 
tionary over the citizen. Such an idea strikes at the root of 
all legitimacy in government; because, if it were true, it would 
prove every public officer unfit precisely in proportion to the 
magnitude of the trust reposed in him by the people. The 
highest interest which the master has in his slave is on account 
of his services ; and the value of these, he will not be likely to 
diminish by any act calculated to interfere with his activity. 
As there are men in the North who ought not, from their bru- 
talitv, ever to be entrusted with a horse; so there are men in 
the South who, for the same reason, ought never to be en- 
trusted with a negro, but as Northern society seldom sees tit 
to interfere when a man abuses his horse, so Southern society 
is equally impassive when a negro is chastised beyond his de- 
serts. Next to the white man, perhaps the most delicately or- 
ganized animal in the world, and the most sensitive to pain, is 
the horse. With his small but active brain, he is extremely 
liable to misapprehension and consequent fits of stupidity. He 
is easily bewildered by novelties, and, when in that condition, 
is often punished as vicious; and he who can pass unmoved 
scenes that almost daily occur in our cities, where some poor 
frightened animal is tortured because he is unable to compre- 
hend the wants of a master more brutal than himself, has lit- 
tle call to become indignant over the occasional severities prac- 
ticed upon slaves a thousand miles away. 

There are differences between individuals of the African as 
there are of the European races ; but with the average negro, 
fear of pain is the only motive of sufficient power to incite to 
exertion. Without the use of this motive, the slaves of the 
plantations would not produce enough for their own subsist- 
ence, much less supply a surplus for the use of their masters. 



17 

That ambition for something better which gives activity to the 
Anglo-Saxon does not exist in the masses of the African peo- 
ple, either at home or in America. The use of the scourge is 
no American invention. It was imported with those upon 
whom it is employed; and of the two, the African master is by 
far the most unsparing and relentless. When Dr. Living- 
ston, after a long period of missionary labor in one of the 
nations where he sojourned, without success, was about to 
abandon his field in utter discouragement, he was confronted by 
the chief, who, on learning the cause of his trouble, informed 
him that the difficulty lay with himself: that the cause was 
good enough, but that the method he had employed was defec- 
tive. He assured him that the rod was the only thing which 
would lead the negro to repentance ; and advised him to resort 
to it immediately, as the sole means by which the light of the 
Gospel could be spread in his dominions. The humane mis- 
sionary, unable to rise to the hight of the argument, neglected 
to avail himself of the counsel of the colored potentate; and 
the consequence is that one important and numerous body of 
African people remain uninstructed in the great truths of 
Christianity. 

The separation of children from their parents, and husbands 
from their wives, is another of the wrongs of Slavery, and one 
upon which it is the custom to expend large stores of the rhet- 
oric of philanthropy. That cases of hardship now and then 
occur, it is impossible to deny; but it is equally certain that 
the cruelties of this practice have been greatly exaggerated. 
Mankind — even Anglo-Saxon mankind — are wont to profess 
considerably more of the yearnings of domestic affection than 
they really feel ; and many a man who has been greatly dis- 
turbed over the tearing asunder of the tenderest ties, which 
takes place in the Southern States, feels little compunction at 
the sorrows of his own neglected wife, or hesitates upon a 
slight inducement to abandon his offspring to the cold charities 
of the world. 

In the Northern States, families are constantly being sepa- 

o 



18 

rated under the force of a necessity quite as imperative as that 
which acts upon the negroes of the Southern. Children at 
early ages are thrown upon their own resources, through the 
vices, or the misfortunes, or the indifference of their parents ; 
and though they may fall into no hands interested in their pro- 
tection — as is the case when a negro child changes owners — 
society troubles itself not at all on their account. They take 
their chances in the world ; and, frequently, are all the better 
in the end, for their abandonment. 

There are no facts to show that the owner of slaves is neces- 
sarily a wanton tyrant who tramples upon the feelings of his 
subjects for his own gratification. It is, in most cases, we are 
permitted to believe, a real, or fancied necessity which impels 
him, now and then, to sever the relation which exists between 
husband and wife; and there are many well authenticated in- 
stances where considerable sacrifices have been made rather 
than allow it to be done. Where there is any real affection 
between the parties, the owner knows its value, as a guaranty 
of their good behavior, too well to be willing, without cause, to 
break up the relation. 

But inconsistent and intermittent as are our own domestic 
affections, we must not judge of those of the negro by them. 
Domestic affection is the result of care, anxiety and sacrifice. 
"We plant a tree," says the sentimental philosopher, "and we 
water because we have planted it." In Africa, the negro is re- 
lieved by the bounty of nature from the care of his family; 
and consequently, he is ready to lend his wife to his friend, or 
sell his children to a stranger. He counts his offspring as his 
riches, marries a number of wives that he may have an abun- 
dance of marketable progeny, and trades them off as the Ken- 
tucky farmer does his stock of another description. In Amer- 
ica, the case is not greatly changed. The providence of the 
master exonerates the slave husband and father from responsi- 
bility, and his affections are less acute in proportion. The 
marital and the parental bonds bring with them little feeling 
of obligation. Even among the colored population in the 



19 

Northern States — exeept where there is a large admixture of 
European blood — the domestic tie is scarcely more than nom- 
inal. The negro abandons his wife and children at the sugges- 
tion of the merest caprice, and wanders off careless whether he 
ever returns again, leaving them often in a state of almost 
equal indifference. 

When the Anglo-Saxon mother folds her children in her 
arms for the last time before sending them forth to seek their 
fortunes in the wide, cold world, her heart is torn with anguish 
at the thought of the multitude of mishaps with which they 
may be overtaken. Her son may fall among bad associates, or 
may lose his health and become poverty-stricken away from 
home, with no one to minister to his necessities; or her daugh- 
ter may be misled and ruined by some seducer, and turned 
forth an outcast from society. None of these apprehensions 
beset the African parent. Her son will be attended with at 
least equal care to that which she bestowed upon him, by one 
who has an interest in his future services ; and her daughter 
also; and if the latter should happen to become the mistress 
of her master, or one of his sons, so far from looking upon it 
as a cause of shame, it will appear to her both proper and 
natural. 

The great evil which is charged upon Slavery is the possible, 
or probable deterioration of the white race in the United 
States, by its intermixture with the negro. While our philan- 
thropists continually strive to convince us that the black man 
differs from the white in nothing but color, and that, with 
equal advantages, he would soon rise to the same level in in- 
tellectual power and social value, they also endeavor to excite 
our fears of the degeneracy which would result from the amal- 
gamation of races which his presence here threatens, in process 
oi time, to effect. These two ideas are frequently j)resented at 
the same time, without any apparent consciousness on the part 
of those who do so of their inconsistency. It is evident, how- 
ever, :hat if the negro is, by nature, equal to the white man, 
no seriously bad consequences will result from the intermix- 



20 

ture; while, on the other hand, it is certain that if he is not 
equal, the deterioration of the joint product will be in propor- 
tion to the relative numbers of the superior and inferior in- 
gredients. 

But the danger which is to come from amalgamation does 
not belong to Slavery, but to the presence of the negro upon 
this Continent. We have no assurance that it would be re- 
moved by emancipation. On the contrary, the evidence is 
the other way. The production of individuals of mixed blood 
goes on in the Northern States where Slavery does not, as well 
as in the Southern where it does exist; and probably in pro- 
portion to the number of negroes, quite as rapidly. Every- 
where, and in all its departments, nature labors to produce 
unity When the two races were brought together upon the 
same territory, their ultimate admixture became a certainty, if 
both shall continue to exist. It may require hundreds or thou- 
sands of years to complete the process ; but the result is none 
the less certain for the length of the period necessary to its ac- 
complishment. Africa has obtained a foothold in America, and 
from that foothold it will not be dislodged. All our efforts to 
remove the negro from our soil, will prove as futile as the 
essays of a child to stop the progress of a running stream by 
building a petty dam across its current. The destiny of the 
human race upon this Continent is fixed beyond the power of 
governments or individuals; and whatever it may be, we and 
our posterity, willing or unwilling, must abide its decrees. 

The industrial affairs of nations and communities, if left 
free to the operation of their own laws, always arrange them- 
selves in such a way as to secure the best good of which the 
whole, as a whole, is capable. In the United States, hitherto, 
little practical interference has been interposed to the econom- 
ical organization of society upon the basis of its own interests 
and affinities; and the result has been great mutual benefits, 
and an unusual degree of prosperity. In respect to its indus- 
trial arrangements and their effects, ours has been the model 
nation of the world. Here, less than in any other country of 



21 

which we have any knowledge, has one man been in the way of 
another. There has been room enough for all. If the ranks 
of one pursuit were full, those of another were open, In pro- 
portion as labor has increased, the demand has extended, and 
new avenues been discovered for its activity. The industry of 
the Northern States has always found an adequate reward ; and 
so has that of the Southern. Neither has, in any respect, in- 
terfered with the other, nor given any token of a prosj^ect of 
interference in the future. If there have been two systems of 
labor, those systems have not been antagonists: on the con- 
trary, they have mutually played into each other's hands. The 
European laborer has found a climate agreeable to himself, con- 
genial to his constitution and well adapted to the employment 
of his energies in the North ; the African has been equally well 
suited in the South. Both have found the place that, in re- 
spect to soil, and the products of which it is capable, is best 
fitted to their tastes and capacities ; where they enjoyed the 
best health, multiplied the most rapidly, and realized the 
largest amount of physical comfort. If Slavery was abhorent 
to the one, it was out of his sight; if free agency was undesir- 
able, under the circumstances, for the other, he was removed 
from contact with those who would be likely to render him un- 
happy under his servitude. - a » 

The North and the South have not been rivals in respect to 
their productions in any of the markets of the world, at home 
or abroad: on the contrary, they have been everywhere auxil- 
iaries. The North cannot profitably produce the cotton, the 
rice, nor the sugar, which are the staples of the South ; nor the 
South the wheat, corn, butter, cheese, horses, cattle and hogs 
that are the staples of the North. Each has its separate prov- 
ince in the world's economy; and each, in that province, 
claimed the proud title of standing pre-eminent. We of the 
North boast that with our wheat and corn-fields and our luxu- 
riant pastures, we can feed the world; they of the South that 
with their cotton plantations, all nations are dependent upon 
them for clothing. 



22 

No contrast can be stronger than that between the harmony 
and admirable adjustment of the social and industrial relations 
of the North and the South, and the antagonism which has 
ever existed in the political. In the social, sectional lines have 
been nearly obliterated under the influence of the ties of affec- 
tion. Scarcely a Northern family of any age is without its rep- 
resentatives in the South; scarcely a Southern family that is 
destitute of a Northern alliance. Mutual emigration and in- 
termarriage have been constantly at work to produce and pre- 
serve an unity of love, to correspond with the existing one of 
interest. The wealthy Scuthron, during the heats of the sum- 
mer, brought his family to Northern places of social resort, 
made himself and them, for the time being, parts of a North- 
ern community, and distributed the surplus of his revenues in 
Northern cities and villages: and although we now and then 
found fault with manners which differed from our own, we have 
been compelled to admit that, with all his family pride, and 
seeming arrogance of demeanor, he was not without a compen- 
sating share of good qualities. 

In the industrial relations, the North has been the customer 
of the South, and the South the customer of the North: each 
supplying to the other articles of the first necessity. The 
North may not be indebted to the South for so large a number 
of commodities ; but those which it does receive, yield to none 
in importance. These are cotton, sugar, rice, tobacco, and that 
first of all the objects of civilized desire — the sum and conti- 
nent of all others — money. To the cultivation of cotton in the 
South we owe the fact that the calicoes, the ginghams, the 
muslins and the almost innumerable articles of which cotton 
is the main ingredient, which minister so materially to our 
comfort, are purchasable at less than one-fourth of the price to 
which they were afforded to our great grandfathers; and to the 
cultivation of sugar, an almost equal reduction in the price of 
that nearly indispensable luxury. 

The articles for which the South has been dependent upon 
the North are of almost infinite number and variety. The 



23 

Southern child of white parents is born upon a bedstead of 
Northern construction, in a house which, if its brick and lum- 
ber are of Southern origin, has all its nails, glass, upholstery 
and furniture of Northern manufacture. He is rocked in a 
Northern cradle, fed with a Northern spoon and clothed in cal- 
icoes, ginghams, muslins and flannels from Northern looms. 
Arrived at youth he goes to school to study Northern books, 
and, perhaps, to be taught by a Northern school-master. His 
boots, clothes and hats all come from Northern shops. He rides 
a Northern horse, upon a Northern saddle, or drives in a North- 
ern carriage, with Northern harness and Northern whip. He 
shoots with a Northern gun, and fights his duels with Northern 
pistols. His food is Northern flour, beef, pork, fish, butter, 
cheese and potatoes. His drink is whisky or wine from North- 
ern distilleries or vineyards. His books, stationery, pens, ink, 
paper, sealing-wax and wafers are all of Northern production. 
He reads, by the light of a Northern candle, a journal printed 
upon Northern paper, with Northern type and ink, washes 
himself with Northern soap, and scents his handkerchief with 
Northern perfumery. In every act and every relation, he is 
surrounded with things of Northern fabrication; and when he 
sleeps with his fathers, the hinges and trimmings of his coffin, 
if not the coffin itself, are of Northern workmanship; he is 
carried to his long home in a Northern hearse; his grave is 
dug with a Northern shovel; and his virtues are commemo- 
rated upon a piece of Northern marble in an inscription en- 
graved, perhaps, by a Northern artist. 

Nor is the relation of the North to the South less marked in 
the industrial than in the domestic sphere. All the utensils 
of Southern cultivation are of Northern make and invention. 
The soil is stirred and the seed covered with the aid of North- 
ern implements. The cotton is divested of its seed by a North- 
ern gin, driven by a Northern engine; it is pressed by a 
Northern press, bound with Northern cordage, transported in a 
Northern car, drawn by a Northern locomotive, and sent to its 
port of destination in a Northern vessel. The sugar is manu- 



24 

factured by Northern machinery, and the tobacco and rice pre- 
pared for market by similar assistance. The slaves derive their 
food and clothing from Northern farms and factories, and dance 
to the music of Northern banjoes and violins. 

This has been called the dependence of the South upon the 
North ; but is it in any other or any different sense, the de- 
pendence of the North upon the South? How many millions 
of individuals in the North derive their subsistence by the pro- 
duction of articles of Southern desire and necessity! How 
many hundreds of thousands of families are furnished with 
homes and the comforts of life ; how many thousands of facto- 
ries and shops, and distilleries, and farms, and warehouses are 
kept in active operation, and made to yield remunerative 
profits throughout the same agency! How many thousand 
ships and steamers find profitable employment in facilitating 
the various exchanges of commodities which take place between 
two great, wealthy and prosperous sections of the same country ! 
In all the economical relations of the world the producer is as 
much dependent upon the consumer as the consumer is upon 
the producer. Tho South can do as well without the proidsions 
and manufactures of the North, as the North can do without 
the cotton and groceries of the South. Place both in posi- 
tions perfectly isolated from the rest of the world, and the South 
is quite as nearly self-sustaining as the North. Its soil will 
readily produce all the articles of primary necessity ; it has 
once, in a great measure, manufactured it own clothing, and, 
doubtless, could, if required, do so again; while the North, if 
the results of an abundance of experiments teach any thing, 
is totally unable to produce with anything like the requisite 
certainty — to say nothing of the others — that great and lead- 
ing article which, next to food and iron, stands highest in the 
list of things indispensable to mankind. 

There are few who have the knowledge or the memory to en- 
able them to estimate the magnitude and importance of the 
economical changes that have taken place upon the North 
American Continent within the last forty years — one of the 



25 

primary causes of which has been the introduction and progress 
of the cotton culture in the Southern States. No political 
•events that the world has ever known has produced revolutions 
so extensive, or — according to all the received rules for esti- 
mating the worth of things — so valuable to the human race; 
and yet the process of transition has gone on so quietly and 
noiselessly that society has never been disturbed, and all we 
have been able to see has been the constantly recurring evi- 
dences of its beneficial effects. 

In the year 1820 the cotton culture may be said to have be- 
come fairly established in the South. All the processes for the 
production of the great staple had come to be well understood*, 
the cotton gin had been generally introduced, and the demand 
for American eotton had become regular in all the European 
markets. All that time the South produced nearly all of its 
own food, and the greater share of its own clothing ; and a large 
proportion of its labor was expended in domestic manufactures, 
and in the cultivation of articles of subsistence. At that 
time Ohio had but little over half a million of inhabitants, and 
produced no surplus for exportation; and the States of Indi- 
ana, Illinois and Michigan had, collectively, less than half the 
population of Ohio. The cotton manufacture of New England 
was in its infancy, and that of Great Britain and France, al- 
though the subject of pride in those countries, bore no compar- 
ison to the vastness to which it has now arisen. 

At this time the idea began to dawn in the minds of the plant- 
ers of the cotton States that, by relinquishing the domestic pro- 
duction of food and clothing, and turning their attention to the 
cultivation of that article for which their soil was peculiarly 
adapted, they could increase their profits sufficiently to enable 
them to purchase, with advantage, their provisions, apparel, 
and a multitude of articles of use or luxury in other markets. 
And here it was that began those intimate relations between the 
economical interests of the two great sections of one country, 
which, during a period of more than forty years, have been grow- 
ing stronger and closer, and more necessary to both, until they 



26 

have acquired such strength and tenacity that nothing but the 
direst convulsions — convulsions that will entail the most lasting 
misfortunes upon both — will ever compel a permanent separa- 
tion. Political revolutions change only dynasties. They are, 
to the people, seldom more than an idea ; often not so much. 
But industrial revolutions change the condition of the masses; 
and where they are forced violently backward, they roll over 
and crush generations. 

From this period, also, dates the commencement of that pro- 
gress which has withdrawn the States of Few England from 
the list of those which produce a surplus of articles of food for 
exportation to foreign countries. As the South, through the 
increase of its cotton cultivation, acquired the ability to pur- 
chase, New England, besides its rapidly enlarging- cotton 
manufacture, turned its attention to the production of an al- 
most endless variety of articles of use, ornament and luxury, 
which the augmented means of the planters enabled them to 
buy. It returned the cotton of the South to its original pro- 
prietors in the form of cloth ; it manufactured boots,, shoes, 
hats, paper, furniture, carriages, tin and wooden ware, and that 
almost interminable list of commodities known under the gene- 
ral title of Yankee notions ; and became, by the same process, 
a pensioner for its food upon the fertile fields of New York,. 
Pennsylvania and the Great West, whose proprietors received, 
in return, its money, the products of its fisheries and its man- 
ufactures. 

It is probable that the happiest and safest condition in which 
a people can be placed is that in which each community pro- 
duces for itself all that it requires. But however desirable 
such a condition may be, experience shows that it is only prac- 
ticable in the simpler forms of society — in short, where it is 
compulsory. Men come to it, not so much by increasing the 
number of their productions, as by reducing the number of 
their wants. In proportion as communities advance in refine- 
ment, they acquire a taste for variety, until nothing short of all 
that the world can produce or invent is equal to the extent and 



27 

number of their desires. It is this which induces them to bear 
and cheerfully pay the cost of commerce, which in itself begets 
nothing valuable, and is simply the instrument by which differ- 
ent parts of the world exchange the surplus of that which 
they grow or create for that which they do not ; but which in 
its effects links all the peoples of the world together in one 
economical community, under the operation of the laws of de- 
mand and supply. 

The happiest and safest practicable condition — other things 
being equal— for a nation, would seem to be that in which each 
of its different sections is able to produce things desirable to 
the others, in such number and variety as in the aggregate to 
make up the sum of human wants, thus rendering it independ- 
ent. To this desirable condition the United States are — or 
were — rapidly approaching, if it was not already a thing real- 
ized. The cotton, sugar, rice, tobacco, groceries and fruits of 
the South came, with its own productions, as nearly as possible 
to making up the complement of things of use, necessity and 
luxury at the North; and the provisions and manufactures of 
the North were doing the same good office for the South. The 
•commerce called into being hj these exchanges, if it was ex- 
pensive, had this mitigating circumstance, that it was domes- 
tic, and its profits enured to, while it supplied remunerative 
employment for many thousands of our fellow-citizens. In 
fact, we have no knowledge of any nation of ancient or modern 
times, each of whose parts was so admirably contrived to be at 
once the servant and the customer of the others ; whose differ- 
ent climates, tastes and forms of labor were so well adapted to 
give aid to each other ; whose accidental differences were pro- 
ductive of so much real unity, and in whose economical sys- 
tems there was so little clashing and injurious competition. 
The white laborer of the North has not needed the cotton lands, 
the rice swamps, the sugar plantations or the tobacco patches 
of the South as fields for his activity; nor has the black laborer 
of the South needed the corn and wheat farms, the shops or the 
factories of the North as fields for his. Each has had ample 



28 

room and verge enough for the exercise of his utmost energies ; 
nor has it been often in the history of either the North or the 
South, within the last forty years, that the labor market has 
been glutted with more hands than it could employ and sup- 
port. 

In respect to the demand for the products of its agriculture,, 
the South has had one advantage over the North ; for while 
the latter has, at least now and then, had in its garners and 
warehouses greater quantities of wheat and corn and pork and 
whisky than were wanted to supply the deficiencies in other- 
countries, the requirements of our own and of foreign nations 
for the staples of the latter, and especially that of cotton, have 
always been in advance of its ability to supply them.. In fact,. 
while the cotton production of the United States has increased 
from eighteen millions of pounds in the year 1800 to nearly 
two thousand millions in 1860, it seems now as far as ever from 
reaching the utmost limit of the demand. 

But no agency has been so efficient to enlarge the foreign 
market for American provisions as the increase of the cotton 
production. The most extensive cotton manufacturing country 
in the world is Great Britain, next to which is France; and 
these are the principal customers of the North and West for 
all the articles which it cultivates and produces. In propor- 
tion as the demand for cotton has been supplied from the 
Southern plantations, has the demand for food for those who 
are engaged in its manufacture increased in magnitude and im- 
proved in regularity. Every ship load of cotton that goes from 
New Orleans or Mobile or Charleston or Savannah, represents 
other ship loads of wheat and corn and beef and pork, that go 
from New York, or New Orleans, or Chicago, or Buffalo. The 
increase in value which British or French labor adds to South- 
ern cotton, enables the laborer to live upon Northern provisions ; 
and thus, even in its exports to foreign lands, the South was 
ministering to the wealth, the power and the progress of the 
North, while it was doing the same thing for itself. 

But the cotton manufacture of the North is only moderate in 



29 

its extent, when compared with that of Great Britain and 
France. According to official reports made in 1850, the amount 
of capital invested in the manufacture of cotton in the United 
States, and mostly in those of the East and North, was, in 
round numbers, $74,000,000; consuming 256,500,000 pounds of 
the raw material, worth in that state $35,000,000; using 121,- 
000 tuns of coal, employing 92,286 persons, who received per 
annum, for wages, the sum of $16,286,000; producing 763,679,- 
000 yards of cloth, of the value of $61,879. 

We may estimate the importance of American cotton to 
other nations, and incidentally to our own, from the fact that 
for many years, over eighty per cent, of all the cotton manufac- 
tured in this country and in Europe has been the growth of the 
United States. From the year 1851 to 1855, according to offi- 
cial documents, the average annual amount of that article 
shipped from our ports to Great Britain and the Continent 
was 1,026,000,000 pounds ; of which England received 712,- 
000,000, France 174,000,000, Spain 34,000,000, the Hanse Towns 
26,000,000, Belgium 17,000,000, Austria 17,000,000, Sardinia 
and Italy 15,000,000, Russia 9,000,000 and the other States the 
remainder. In 1857 the export had risen to 1,048,282,475 
pounds, valued at home at $131,575,859. 

Some idea of the value of slave labor in the Southern States 
to the industry of the world, may be gained by a glance at the 
amount of exportable products of those States, which form the 
subjects of commerce. With the exception of a mere fraction, 
the whole vast aggregate of the cotton crop is sent out of the 
States in which it is produced; while of the other articles, only 
the surplus is exported. The annual value of the cotton which 
the South sends to other countries, including the North, may 
be set down as an average of $260,000,000; of tobacco $25,000,- 
000; of sugar and molasses $10,000,000; of rice $5,000,000, 
making in all $300,000,000. For these she receives little money 
in return. Her payment has been in the products of the fields, 
shops and manufactories of the North, and of other countries, 
the greater share of which have paid a profit to Northern mer- 



30 

chants, brokers and importers. The cotton has at once clothed 
all Christendom, supported its commerce and provided neces- 
sary employment for many millions of its laboring population. 
The number of the people of Great Britain engaged and di- 
rectly interested in the cotton manufacture is greater than the 
entire population of ]\ T ew England, and the number in France 
nearly as great. The value of the annual export of cotton fab- 
rics from Great Britain may be set down at $250,000,000, being 
two-thirds of all the woven fabrics exported from the empire. 
Speaking of the American production of cotton and the effect 
which it was producing, not only upon our own prosperity but 
upon the destiny of other nations, BlackivoocVs Magazine, in 
January, 1853, employed the following forcible language: 

" With its increased growth has sprung up that mercantile 
navy which now waves its stripes and stars over every sea, and 
that foreign influence, which has placed the internal peace — we 
may say the subsistence of millions in every manufacturing 
country in Europe — within the power of an oligarchy of cot- 
ton planters." 

In another paragraph is depicted the effect which disturb- 
ances upon this continent would produce in Great Britain: 

"Let any great social or physical convulsion visit the United 
Sta.es, and England would feel the shock from Land's End to 
John O' Groat's. The lives of nearly two millions of our coun- 
trymen are dependent upon the cotton crops of America; their 
destiny may be said, without any hyperbole, to hang upon a 
thread. Should any dire calamity befal the land of cotton, a 
thousand of our merchant ships would rot idly in dock; ten 
thousand mills stop their busy looms; two thousand thousand 
mouths starve for lack of food to feed them." 

That the forcible abolition of Slavery in the United States 
would bring upon England all and more of the calamities here 
depicted, there can be no doubt. That such an event would 
put a stop to the production of cotton as an article of com- 
merce, either foreign or domestic, is a thing which even those 
who urge on the work of abolition do not deny; and of which 
the people of Great Britain have had too much experience to 
enable them to entertain a doubt. That the prospect of such 



31 

an event should therefore awaken in their minds, and in the 
mind of their government, the most serious apprehensions, 
is not surprising. Greatly as they may desire to draw their 
future supplies of that staple from other countries, and thus 
escape the dangers which may arise from our social or phys- 
ical convulsions, they are aware that, for the present, Ameri- 
can cotton is to them an article of the first necessity; and 
that upon its receipt, in quantities sufficient to meet the re- 
quirements of their manufacturing population, depends not 
merely their industrial prosperity and the lives of millions of 
people, but the solvency of the government — perhaps its very 
existence — the safety of the state, and its immunity from inter- 
nal commotion and civil war. 

But great as are the calamities that would befall Great Brit- 
ain in consequence of the failure in the supply of American 
cotton, those that would overtake the North would be no less 
serious, while they might be even more wide-spread and per- 
vading. Not only would the thousands of our cotton-mills stop 
their busy looms, and our thousands of ships and steamers rot 
idly in dock, but the impulse which has tilled the whole coun- 
try w T ith flourishing towns and cities, and which has made 
practicable our tens of thousands of miles of railway — which 
has extended our cultivating industry over millions of acres of 
territory, and dotted the whole North with shops and factories 
and founderies for the production of articles to supply a South- 
ern demand, would be taken away. That vast and busy agri- 
cultural population which now finds employment and wealth in 
producing its hundreds of millions of dollars in annual value 
of surplus to feed the laborers of the South and the workmen 
in the cotton-mills of Europe, would find their market de- 
stroyed, their sources of revenue dried up, their occupation 
gone, and themselves reduced to that which, in comparison 
with their past condition, is poverty. The capitalist will find 
his capital unproductive, and himself a pensioner upon his 
principal; and the laborer will fail to receive those wages 
which have heretofore been the sources of his subsistence. 



32 

Nor will this wide-spread stagnation be unaccompanied by 
waiit and real suffering. With no demand for the products of 
labor, production will cease; and the reluctant workmen will 
stand idle and hungry in the market-places. Not merely des- 
titution, but that discontent which always, to a greater or less 
extent, accompanies it, will ensue; and those disturbances which 
the statesmen of other nations, with just reason, fear, in con- 
sequence of our distractions, will find an equally dangerous 
counterpart in our own society. 

It is doubtless true that, in the course of time, the North 
would adapt itself to the altered condition which abolition 
would necessitate, and such changes would take place in its in- 
dustrial system as would render its laboring population self- 
sustaining; but who is able to calculate how long it would be 
before the transition could be accomplished, or the sum of the 
suffering that must, in the mean time, be endured? To grad- 
ual revolutions, especially when they are for the better, men 
conform with readiness; but violent ones, particularly when 
they are for the worse, while they bear heavily upon all, press 
with crushing weight upon the class that, having no stores laid 
up for times of adversity, are least able to endure them. The 
North has not less than a thousand millions of dollars of fixed 
capital, invested in machinery, implements and fixtures for the 
production of articles of Southern demand Abolition will, at 
a single blow, render these instrumentalities worthless, and 
wipe the capital which they represent out of existence. It 
has, perhaps, another thousand millions invested in the pro- 
duction of articles of foreign demand, the ability to purchase 
which by foreign nations depends upon the regular supply of 
cotton from Southern plantations, which will, to a great ex- 
tent, incur the same fate. The use of this, and a still greater 
floating capital, has hitherto supplied several millions of 
Northern people with that employment which is to them food, 
clothing and home. It is a sad thing when such are, even tem- 
porarily deprived of a market for their labor, but when this 
privation is accompanied by the necessity, not merely to learn 



33 

new occupations, but to wait until, in the progress of events, 
new fields shall be discovered and opened, starvation or sup- 
port at the public expense is inevitable. Such an event will 
practically set the people of the North back half a century in 
their material progress, and undo that which, for two genera- 
tions, has been the principal subject of their pride; and with 
these additional disadvantages, that with a vast and burden- 
some public debt pressing with almost annihilating force upon 
every branch of industry, the former avenues of her trade 
and industry will be blockaded, with no new ones open to sup- 
ply their places, while she will have upon her hands a numer- 
ous horde of paupers, who, with their posterity, will, perhaps, 
for generations to come, demand to be fed and clothed from the 
wasted revenues of the people and the bankrupt coffers of the 
gOA r ernment. 

There are those who, with a pretence of sagacity superior to 
that which is permitted to ordinary mortals, affect to despise 
considerations like these ; but they are mostly such as, having 
become possessed to the full extent of their capacity with one 
idea, have no room to give entertainment to another. Assum- 
ing that Slavery is the one great evil that infests the world, 
they close their eyes upon all other evils, present or prospec- 
tive, and are willing that the world shall be overturned rather 
than Slavery be continued. When Robespierre — the head of 
the first Abolition Society of modern times — was told that the 
cause he was advocating in the French National Assembly, in 
1771, in respect to the mulattoes of St. Domingo, would ruin 
the colonies: "Perish the colonies," was the reply of that dis- 
tinguished patriot and philanthropist, "rather than sacrifice 
one iota of our principles." The mantle of the President of 
the celebrated Society of Amis des Noirs appears to have de- 
scended upon his American successors. Perish the South, 
rather than sacrifice one iota of our principles ! And nojt only 
perish the South, but perish the North also! is virtually their 
exclamation. Let all America, white and black, be involved 

in a common ruin, so that the bond which binds the slave to his 

5 



34 

master be broken. These Robespierres of the nineteenth cen- 
tury were, a few months ago, disunionists. They called the 
Constitution of the United States a compact with Hell, agitated 
for its overthrow, and, more than any others, are the authors 
of the present deplorable condition of the country. Now they 
are the most violent friends of the Union, and clamor loudest 
for its restoration. They constitute the leaders of the extreme 
movement party, have the control of a multitude of newspa- 
pers, hold possession of all the lecture-halls of the country, 
and are able to drive or exclude from the field all who disagree 
with them in opinion or dissent from the destructive measures 
which they propose. 

Is any one idle enough to suppose that these men are any 
better friends of the Union than they were twelve months ago? 
What have they ever done but to jeopardize its interests and 
peril its tranquillity? Does any one sincerely believe that 
they are more than other men, friends of the negro? Do they 
admit him to their houses, cherish him in their social circles, or 
strive, in any way, to elevate him to an equality with them- 
selves? Does their hatred of Slavery impel them to discour- 
age its continuance by dispensing with those articles of com- 
fort or luxury which slaves produce? It must make the 
Devil — if there is a Devil — wriggle his tail — if he has a tail- — 
with delight, to hear a gentleman who clothes himself and his 
family in slave-labor cottons, regales himself with slave-labor 
coffee, sweetened with slave-labor sugar, eats slave-labor rice, 
and solaces himself after dinner with a pipe of slave-labor to- 
bacco, mounted in pulpit or rostrum, and haranguing of the 
wrongs, sins, evils and cruelties of slavery. The detestable 
meanness of such a proceeding is only equaled by its consum- 
mate hypocrisy. For very shame, let these gentlemen deny 
themselves the use of those things which — as they contend — 
are the symbols of the blood and tears of men and women per- 
ishing in hopeless servitude, and then they will be able to show 
the world, at least one evidence of their sincerity. 

But this is not all. The true way to get rid of Slavery is to 



35 

supercede it by free labor. Let our philanthropists turn their 
attention to the culture of cotton and sugar and rice and to- 
bacco, and by the superior cheapness of their crops drive the 
symbols of blood and tears from the markets of Christendom. 
The South is — at least it was — all before them. They could 
have afforded mankind the best possible proof of their convic- 
tion of the truth of their principles by proving, in their own 
persons, the correctness of their theories. The Rev. Cheevee 
might have been, if not as ornamental, quite as useful to his 
species, by doing daily duty in a rice plantation ; the elegant 
figure of the Rev. Bellows would have become additionally 
interesting while conveying armfulls of cane to the sugar 
manufactory ; the chubby fingers of the Rev. Beecher would 
serve an excellent purpose in picking the virgin cotton from 
its prudish pod ; and the Garrisons, the Greeleys, and others 
of the same species, might, perhaps, have wrought salvation 
to millions of the negro race by their superior skill in hoeing, 
worming and stripping tobacco. 

At present our country seems to be lying prostrate at the 
feet of the destructionists ; and there is, to appearance, no one 
to raise a voice imploring them to hold off their hands. Re- 
presentations of the damage they are doing, and of the evils 
they are entailing upon the land and upon posterity, find no 
listeners. The cry is Havoc! Let us destroy ourselves, so 
that we may also destroy our adversaries. To predict and to 
dare every evil that can befall a country and a people, is ac- 
cepted as a mark of superior patriotism ; and windy orators 
upon the floor of Congress, who profess to be willing to lie down 
in paupers' graves, so that they can rid the land of the black 
curse of Slavery, are greeted with rounds of applause from the 
galleries. To suppose that these people will endure any better 
than others the burdens that the future is destined to bring, is 
to take upon trust that which can only be proven by experi- 
ment. The bravery to suffer prospective misfortunes is a very 
different thing from the constancy to bear real ones. It may 
be a pleasant thing for those to whom a pauper's grave is only 



36 

a figure of speech to defy its terrors ; but it need not be forgot- 
ten that there are thousands among us already to whom the- 
pauper's grave is an imminent reality. God may provide com- 
fortable salaries for incendiary clergymen, as the Government 
does for those gentlemen who continue to combine in one per- 
son the character of patriot and peculator. But beneath these 
there is a large class of people equally deserving, and a great 
deal more useful, in whose favor there are no such special dis- 
pensations. While the world is amused with the vaporings of 
the one, it may forget the sufferings of the other. The real 
loss falls upon those who deserve it least — honest farmers, care- 
ful merchants, industrious tradesmen, enterprising manfactur- 
ers and helpless laborers. 



L'BRARY OF CONGRESS 

III! 

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